Nothing Secret About Victoria's Secret

The latest commercial of Victoria's Secret, that lacy underthang company, tries to tell me that the perfect gift I could give this Christmas season is one their of lacy underthangs.  Or so I think that's what they're telling me.   I'm a little distracted by all the ladies the commercial has caught lounging in their undies. They don't seem to be bothered at all to be caught short, clothing-wise.  I guess I shouldn't be either.  But I get the message:   nothing recalls the gift of Christ like giving a gift of super-sexy underwear to the one you love.

And Victoria's secret use of a religious iconography seems a little odd, too - you know, their models wearing angel wings as they glide down the runway in their recent fashion show.  Certainly the Bible has its share of eroticism but I can't imagine the angels going about their glorious tasks in their skimpy frockery and high-heeled shoes.  That would have been a sight for those poor shepherds to see that Christmas night so long ago.

Well, at least this gives me an opportunity to give you another poem by my favorite poet, Billy Collins.  As he says, this is already too much, this fuss about things that used to be unmentionable:


Victoria's Secret

The one in the upper left-hand corner
is giving me a look
that says I know you are here
and I have nothing better to do
for the remainder of human time
than return your persistent but engaging stare.
She is wearing a deeply scalloped
flame-stitch halter top
with padded push-up styling
and easy side-zip tap pants.

The one on the facing page, however,
who looks at me over her bare shoulder,
cannot hide the shadow of annoyance in her brow.
You have interrupted me,
she seems to be saying,
with your coughing and your loud music.
Now please leave me alone;
let me finish whatever it was I was doing
in my organza-trimmed
whisperweight camisole with
keyhole closure and a point d'esprit mesh back.

I wet my thumb and flip the page.
Here, the one who

happens to be reclining
in a satin and lace merry widow
with an inset lace-up front,
decorated underwire cups and bodice
with lace ruffles along the bottom
and hook-and-eye closure in the back,
is wearing a slightly contorted expression,
her head thrust back, mouth partially open,
a confusing mixture of pain and surprise
as if she had stepped on a tack
just as I was breaking down
her bedroom door with my shoulder.

Nor does the one directly beneath her
look particularly happy to see me.
She is arching one eyebrow slightly
as if to say, so what if I am wearing nothing
but this stretch panne velvet bodysuit
with a low sweetheart neckline
featuring molded cups and adjustable straps.
Do you have a problem with that?

The one on the far right is easier to take,
her eyes half-closed
as if she were listening to a medley
of lullabies playing faintly on a music box.
Soon she will drop off to sleep,
her head nestled in the soft crook of her arm,
and later she will wake up in her
Spandex slip dress with the high side slit,
deep scoop neckline, elastic shirring,
and concealed back zip and vent.

But opposite her,
stretched out catlike on a couch
in the warm glow of a paneled library,
is one who wears a distinctly challenging expression,
her face tipped up, exposing
her long neck, her perfectly flared nostrils.
Go ahead, her expression tells me,
take off my satin charmeuse gown
with a sheer, jacquard bodice
decorated with a touch of shimmering Lurex.
Go ahead, fling it into the fireplace.
What do I care, her eyes say, we're all going to hell anyway.

I have other mail to open,
but I cannot help noticing her neighbor
whose eyes are downcast,
her head ever so demurely bowed to the side
as if she were the model who sat for Coreggio
when he painted "The Madonna of St. Jerome,"
only, it became so ungodly hot in Parma
that afternoon, she had to remove
the traditional blue robe
and pose there in his studio
in a beautifully shaped satin teddy
with an embossed V-front,
princess seaming to mold the bodice,
and puckered knit detail.

And occupying the whole facing page
is one who displays that expression
we have come to associate with photographic beauty.
Yes, she is pouting about something,
all lower lip and cheekbone.
Perhaps her ice cream has tumbled
out of its cone onto the parquet floor.
Perhaps she has been waiting all day
for a new sofa to be delivered,
waiting all day in a stretch lace hipster
with lattice edging, satin frog closures,
velvet scrollwork, cuffed ankles,
flare silhouette, and knotted shoulder straps
available in black, champagne, almond,
cinnabar, plum, bronze, mocha,
peach, ivory, caramel, blush, butter, rose, and periwinkle.
It is, of course, impossible to say,
impossible to know what she is thinking,
why her mouth is the shape of petulance.

But this is already too much.
Who has the time to linger on these delicate
lures, these once unmentionable things?
Life is rushing by like a mad, swollen river.
One minute roses are opening in the garden
and the next, snow is flying past my window.
Plus the phone is ringing.
The dog is whining at the door.
Rain is beating on the roof.
And as always there is a list of things I have to do
before the night descends, black and silky,
and the dark hours begin to hurtle by,
before the little doors of the body swing shut
and I ride to sleep, my closed eyes
still burning from all the glossy lights of day.

Ballistics - Book Review

I thoroughly enjoyed Ballistics, Billy Collins' latest collection of poetry, but then I'm a superfan so that shouldn't come as any surprise. More delightful, wryly funny, gently-observed, forgiving poems by the former Poet Laureate of the United States.

It's hard to pick a favorite but let's go with the last one of the book:

Envoy

Go, little book,
out of this house and into the world.

carriage made of paper rolling toward town
bearing a single passenger
beyond the reach of this jittery pen
far from the desk and nosy gooseneck lamp.

It is time to decamp,
put on a jacket and venture outside
time to be regarded by other eyes,
bound to be held in foreign hands.

So off you go, infant of the brain,
with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:

stay out as long as you like,
don't bother to call or write,
and talk to as many strangers as you can.

"Nosey gooseneck lamp." Love it.

What else can I say about Collins that I haven't already said? Nothing, I suppose, so I'll just leave you with a high recommendation for this book or any others he's written.

How to Blog

Congratulations to Ann Althouse and marking six years of blogging. I used to visit her site quite often some years ago but she lost me when she mocked Tom Coburn's weeping during the John Roberts' confirmation hearings. I have other issues with her as well but I haven't let that give me reason to delete her from my Google Reader feed and, on occasion, link to her and, very, very rarely, comment over there. Click the link so she can tell you her own accomplishments but, despite my problems with her, I can't deny that she's accomplishing something over there that is uniquely hers. Good for her, I say.

An Althouse commenter linked to Billy Collins' poem "Marginalia," which is what Althouse first called her blog. I see Althouse lifted the poem's wonderful last line and put it in her blog header for the time being. To heck with a link, I say. Here's the entire poem:

Marginalia



Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author

raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

I'm Not the Only Fan of Billy Collins

If he's not already, Instapundit soon will be a fan of Billy Collins.

This link will take you to all of my Billy Collins posts and you can see what the fuss is about. I'm re-reading his Sailing Alone Around the Room and finding it as delightful as ever.

Student of Clouds

My online pal Jason posted about his love of paintings of clouds and I promised him a link to a poem by my favorite poet Billy Collins about that very subject. A good enough reason to post the poem here:

Student of Clouds

The emotion is to be found in the clouds,
not in the green solids of the sloping hills
or even in the gray signatures of rivers,
according to Constable, who was a student of clouds
and filled shelves of sketchbooks with their motion,
their lofty gesturing and sudden implications of weather.

Outdoors, he must have look up thousands of times,
his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging
and the silent commotion of their eddying and flow.
Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw
as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers
and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors
to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

In photographs we can stop all this movement now
long enough to tag them with their Latin names.
Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus -
dizzying, romantic, authoritarian -
they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below
where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

High on the soft blue canvases of Constable
they are stuck in pigment, but his clouds appear
to be moving still in the wind of his brush,
inching out of England and the nineteenth century
and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,
bareheaded beneath this cupola of motion,
my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

A good way to start the day, I hope.

(The Constable Collins refers to is John Constable, an English landscape painter.

Victoria Has a Secret

Who was worried just the other day about those bee-stung lipped models on those Victoria's Secret posters and their serious looks while in their underwear? I was! But my favorite poet Billy Collins has his take on the subject, too, and he may have some insight about why these models seem so troubled:

Victoria's Secret

by Billy Collins

The one in the upper-left-hand corner
is giving me a look
that says I know you are here
and I have nothing better to do
for the remainder of human time
than return your persistent but engaging stare.
She is wearing a deeply scalloped
flame-stitch halter top
with padded push-up styling
and easy side-zip tap pants.

The one on the facing page, however,
who looks at me over her bare shoulder,
cannot hide the shadow of annoyance in her brow.
You have interrupted me,
she seems to be saying,
with your coughing and your loud music.
Now please leave me alone;
let me finish whatever it was I was doing
in my organza-trimmed
whisperweight camisole with
keyhole closure and point d'esprit mesh back.

I wet my thumb and flip the page.
Here, the one who happens to be reclining
in a satin and lace merry widow
with an inset lace-up front,
decorated underwire cups and bodice
with lace ruffles along the bottom
and hook-and-eye closure in the back,
is wearing a slightly contorted expression,
her head thrust back, mouth partially open,
a confusing mixture of pain and surprise
as if she had stepped on a tack
just as I was breaking down
her bedroom door with my shoulder.

Nor does the one directly beneath her
look particularly happy to see me.
She is arching one eyebrow slightly
as if to say, so what if I am wearing nothing
but this stretch panne velvet bodysuit
with a low sweetheart neckline
featuring molded cups and adjustable straps.
Do you have a problem with that?!

The one on the far right is easier to take,
her eyes half-closed
as if she were listening to a medley
of lullabies playing faintly on a music box.
Soon she will drop off to sleep,
her head nestled in the soft crook of her arm,
and later she will wake up in her
Spandex slip dress with the high side slit,
deep scoop neckline, elastic shirring,
and concealed back zip and vent.

But opposite her,
stretched out catlike on a couch
in the warm glow of a paneled library,
is one who wears a distinctly challenging expression,
her face tipped up, exposing
her long neck, her perfectly flared nostrils.
Go ahead, her expression tells me,
take off my satin charmeuse gown
with a sheer, jacquard bodice
decorated with a touch of shimmering Lurex.
Go ahead, fling it into the fireplace.
What do I care, her eyes say, we're all going to hell anyway.

I have other mail to open,
but I cannot help noticing her neighbor
whose eyes are downcast,
her head ever so demurely bowed to the side
as if she were the model who sat for Correggio
when he painted "The Madonna of St. Jerome,"
only, it became so ungodly hot in Parma
that afternoon, she had to remove
the traditional blue robe
and pose there in his studio
in a beautifully shaped satin teddy
with an embossed V-front,
princess seaming to mold the bodice,
and puckered knit detail.

And occupying the whole facing page
is one who displays that expression
we have come to associate with photographic beauty.
Yes, she is pouting about something,
all lower lip and cheekbone.
Perhaps her ice cream has tumbled
out of its cone onto the parquet floor.
Perhaps she has been waiting all day
for a new sofa to be delivered,
waiting all day in stretch lace hipster
with lattice edging, satin frog closures,
velvet scrollwork, cuffed ankles,
flare silhouette, and knotted shoulder straps
available in black, champagne, almond,
cinnabar, plum, bronze, mocha,
peach, ivory, caramel, blush, butter, rose, and periwinkle.
It is, of course, impossible to say,
impossible to know what she is thinking,
why her mouth is the shape of petulance.

But this is already too much.
Who has the time to linger on these delicate
lures, these once unmentionable things?
Life is rushing by like a mad, swollen river.
One minute roses are opening in the garden
and the next, snow is flying past my window.
Plus the phone is ringing.
The dog is whining at the door.
Rain is beating on the roof.
And as always there is a list of things I have to do
before the night descends, black and silky,
and the dark hours begin to hurtle by,
before the little doors of the body swing shut
and I ride to sleep, my closed eyes
still burning from all the glossy lights of day.

"Perhaps her ice cream has tumbled." Of course!

On Poets & Poetry

I've tried to bring poetry to this blog in my own small way but I know most people - heck, everyone - doesn't really have time, or the inclination, to enjoy it. Well, now a new book, “On Poets & Poetry” by William H. Pritchard attempts to correct that and make a case for the pleasures of poetry:

Most readers of poetry will credit a gifted critic or teacher who first led them through an ode by Keats or a sonnet by Shakespeare. Such careful guidance, often line by line, reveals marvels of imagery here, musical flourishes there, and a deepened sense of the poet’s concerns. What’s more, it ­encourages readers to discover poetry’s enriching and pleasurable effects for themselves. “The elucidation of works of art,” T.S. Eliot wrote, is half of the critic’s job; the other half, he said, was “the correction of taste.”

William H. Pritchard has been elucidating works of art for his students at Amherst College for more than 50 years—and, for almost as long, correcting (or ­guiding) the taste of readers at the Times Literary ­Supplement, the Hudson Review and other literary publications. In the preface to ­“On Poets & ­Poetry,” he extols the ­c­lassroom as “the only place where ­something like a ­conversation can be started” about
literature. “One doesn’t expect to have such a conversation,” he sighs, “when dining at a friend’s or even when passing the time with a ­professional colleague.” If even English professors can’t chat about their reading, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Hey, poetry is easy to read so why not find a way to work in some to your reading. As you know, my favorite poet right now is Billy Collins; his work is easy accessible, wryly funny, rewarding if you choose to dig a little deeper but enjoyable enough if you don't. Find your own favorite. It'll be worth your time.

Talking with the Tax Man about Poetry

From a review of Billy Collins' Sailing Alone Around the Room:

Billy Collins’ poetry has long been described as “accessible”—a term that has been used as both a compliment and a disparagement. There is no doubt that the simplicity of his language and the applicability of his everyday subject matter make Collins’ poetry interesting and approachable to a wide range of readers. For his devotees, Billy Collins’ brilliance lies in this straightforwardness and its ability to captivate people who are completely unfamiliar with poetry. For his critics, however, his trademark plain language and common themes imply a kind of self-centered superficiality that, while attracting readers, fails in its poetic duty to create new understanding. Good or bad, Collins’ accessibility has brought him commercial success almost unprecedented for a living poet.

See? It's not just me.

(I'm not sure where the "tax man" part of the review's title plays into things but you can see why it caught my eye; it's a perfect fit for this blog, isn't it?)

More Poetry

Wasn't I talking about poetry just the other day? Yes, I think I was. Well, if I didn't sell you on the need to go right out and grab all the Billy Collins you can, here's another poem of his which serves as, er, an introduction to poetry.

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

You're welcome.

Furniture and Poetry

Clara's on the hunt for new furniture so off we went. While she prowled the furniture store, I kept amused by flipping through the books scattered around as decoration. Lots of legal reference and Reader's Digest Condensed Books - big, chunky books that look great on a table or bookcase but not really meant to be read. One of the books, though, gave me cause to find a chair and thumb through a little more closely: a collection of American Literature. I can't remember the title but I was impressed by the breadth of its selection.

The first author I always check for to determine a literary collection's worth is Hemingway; political correctness has caused him to fall from favor in some collections but no study of American Literature is complete without him. Sure enough, this collection included Soldier's Home, not his best but the protagonist comes home to Oklahoma so, well, we'll take that. A good volume, then.

Moving to the poetry section, I came across a poem by the recent U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Among the books I'm not reading, I've managed to finish for the umpteenth time Collins' Sailing Around The Room, a collection of his greatest hits from past collections and some new poems. His poetry is clear, easily accessible, and never fail to delight. The literature collection had this poem, which serves as a fine sample of Collins' work.

Schoolsville

Glancing over my shoulder at the past,
I realize the number of students I have taught
is enough to populate a small town.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,
chalk dust flurrying down in winter,
nights dark as a blackboard.

The population ages but never graduates.
On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park
and when it's cold they shiver around stoves
reading disorganized essays out loud.
A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags
into the streets with their books.

I forgot all their last names first and their
first names last in alphabetical order.
But the boy who always had his hand up
is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.
The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine.

Their grades are sewn into their clothes
like references to Hawthorne.
The A's stroll along with other A's.
The D's honk whenever they pass another D.

All the creative-writing students recline
on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.
Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

Needless to say, I am the mayor.
I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.
I rarely leave the house. The car deflates
in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.

Once in a while a student knocks on the door
with a term paper fifteen years late
or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.
And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane
to watch me lecturing the wallpaper,
quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.

See what I mean?

But the point of this post is that I had just read and enjoyed this poem a few days before finding it again in a furniture store on a winter's afternoon. You just never know where, or when, you'll be delighted.